Stylos is the blog of Jeff Riddle, a Reformed Baptist Pastor in North Garden, Virginia. The title "Stylos" is the Greek word for pillar. In 1 Timothy 3:15 Paul urges his readers to consider "how thou oughtest to behave thyself in the house of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar (stylos) and ground of the truth."

Wednesday, September 28, 2016

Word Magazine # 57: Did the Gospels "plagiarize" Pagan Myths?

I recently stumbled upon a youtube video by a young atheist
apologist named Jaclyn Glenn titled “Disproving
Christianity: Jesus is a Lie”
(posted in 2013). I thought it might be
worthwhile to offer a brief critique.

Her main argument: She
claims that that Christians plagiarized the life of Jesus from myths of various
pagan deities, including:

The Egyptian god Horus,

The Hindu/Indian god Krishna,

And the Persian/Roman god Mithras.

Here are five logical and factual problems with this claim:

1. She does not use primary sources to make
these claims but biased and inaccurate summaries.

She makes reference to only one original source (the Egyptian
Book of the Dead for Horus), and that
in name only with no direct citations. Her
other references are to either her own summaries of these accounts or to those
made by others, all of which are surely hostile to historical Christianity.

For an example of a refutation of Horus/Jesus parallels see
this site.

There is a major difference between pagan mythological accounts
and the Biblical narrative which are rooted in recognizable reality.

Example: She suggests
that Horus also may have experienced a virgin birth. This is how the Wikipedia article on Horus
summarizes the myth of his origin:

Horus was born to the goddess Isis after she retrieved all the
dismembered body parts of her murdered husband Osiris, except his penis, which
was thrown into the Nile and eaten by acatfish,or sometimes by a crab, and
according toPlutarch’s account
used her magic powers to resurrect Osiris and fashion a goldenphallusto conceive her son (older Egyptian
accounts have the penis of Osiris surviving).

Once
Isis knew she was pregnant with Horus, she fled to theNile Deltamarshlands to hide from her brother
Set, who jealously killed Osiris and who she knew would want to kill their son. There Isis bore a divine son, Horus.

This is hardly comparable
to the virginal conception in the historical Biblical narratives of Matthew 1-2
and Luke 1-2.

2. She makes the unsubstantiated claim that the
wide circulation of these myths pre-date Christianity.

In fact, though there were pre-Christian myths of various
deities, those in the Western world did not come to know many of them until
they were written about by Greek and Roman authors. Example: Those in the Greco-Roman world would
most likely have come to know about Horus not by reading the Egyptian Book of the Dead but by reading Plutarch’s
retelling of the Isis, Osiris, Horus myth in his Moralia. Plutarch lived from c. 40-120 AD. Those in the larger Greco-Roman world might
not have even heard of Horus till long after the Christian movement began and the
NT Gospels had been written.

For a similar problem with supposed parallels between
Christianity and Mithraism, see Ronald H. Nash’s book The Gospel and the Greeks (P&R, 1992, 2003): pp. 133-138. Nash concludes that the major
problem with this theory is “the fact that the timing is all wrong,” since “the
flowering of Mithraism occurred after the close of the NT canon, too late for
it to have influenced the development of first-century Christianity” (p. 137).

3. She ignores the possibility that the
influence may have run in the opposite direction.

Pagan articulation of their divine myth may have been
influenced by the rising popularity of the Christian Gospels.

4. She wrongly assumes that there would have
been a large gap of time between the life of the historical Jesus and the
development of myths borrowed from other religions.

She does not deny the historicity of the life of Jesus. But she does not acknowledge that the Gospels
and other Christian writings were written soon after his life, that they share
in wide agreement about the basic facts of Jesus’ life across multiple sources,
and that contemporary eyewitnesses might easily have challenged anything that was
inaccurate.

5. It does not make sense to posit that
monotheistic Jewish Christians would have borrowed from polytheistic pagan myth
to enhance the story of Jesus.

For Israelite hostility to paganism read Isaiah’s attack on
idolatry in Isaiah 44 or the Psalmist’s in Psalm 115. Then read about Paul’s visit to pagan Athens
in Acts 17.

Conclusion: You may embrace or reject the Gospel accounts
of the life of Jesus but to claim that they have their origin in pagan myths is
illogical and historically inaccurate.